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Today marks the end of the first full month of Fandango’s One-Word Challenge. WordPress published its final Daily Prompt on May 31 and I decided that I would pick up the baton and run with it. Or the gauntlet or whatever it is you pick up to accept a challenge.

Not surprisingly, I wasn’t the only blogger who decided to jump in and fill the vacuum that the folks at WordPress left. There are at least a half a dozen other bloggers (or teams of bloggers) besides me who have entered the daily prompt game.

One blogger, Judy Dykstra-Brown over at Lifelessons, published a poem the other day about what she refers to as the waterfall of prompts that greet bloggers every morning and how we are scrambling to fill all the demands of the plethora of prompts.

There are so many daily one-word prompts now that many bloggers have taken to writing responses using multiple daily prompts in a single post. My blogging buddy, Jim Adams over at A Unique Title For Me, usually incorporates anywhere from six to ten prompts in his daily prompt response posts. And it’s not unusual for other bloggers to include two, three, four, or more daily prompts in their posts.

So this begs the question, how much is too much? Managing a daily one-word prompt is not easy. It takes time and effort to choose good words to use, to post the prompts, to read all of the responses to the prompts, and to write my responses to my own daily one-word prompts. All while trying to keep up with the other prompts I regularly respond to and to continue to rant about Donald Trump.

I admit that hosting FOWC has done wonders for my stats. My blog got more that twice as many views this month as it did in March, my previous high month for page views. But do you really need or want all of these daily prompts hanging over your head each day? Would your lives be easier if there were a few fewer daily prompts to deal with?

Today, a blogger, Pensitivity101, who participates in my One-Word Challenge, wrote, “Well, here we are on Day 30 of Fandango’s word challenge, and long may it continue.”

So I have to ask myself if I should continue posting Fandango’s One-Word Challenge each day. It is, as I said, a lot of work. But at the same time, I really do enjoy doing it.

Let me pose the same question to you. Would you like me to continue with this daily prompt or would you prefer that I do what the folks at WordPress did and hang it up?

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Helen managed to hold herself together well during the funeral and the gathering at her home afterwards. But that was yesterday. Now it was time to head to her father’s apartment to begin the task of taking inventory of his possessions and to start throwing out those things that were of no value.

It wasn’t until she walked into the small room where he had kept all of his instruments and music that the full weight of her loss hit her.

“Dammit, Daddy,” she said aloud even though she was alone. “Why didn’t I inherit any of your musical talents?”

(100 words)

Written for Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ Friday Fictioneers prompt. (Yes, I know it’s Saturday and I’m a day late. So what?) Photo credit: Rochelle Wisoff-Fields.

When I first read the prompt, my mind got stuck on the TV show Cheers, a great and very popular half-hour sitcom, which ran for eleven seasons from September 1982 through May 1993.

An eclectic ensemble of actors portrayed the regular patrons of a Boston bar, Cheers, who shared their experiences and lives with each other while drinking or working at the bar “where everybody knows your name.”

My wife and I loved that show and when we decided to visit Boston one year, high on our agenda was a visit to the Cheers bar. Little did we know that, while the show reused the same exterior shots in Boston for nearly every episode, the interior shots of the bar were filmed with a live studio audience at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles.

It turned out that the name of the bar in Boston where all the exterior shots were taken wasn’t even Cheers. The bar’s name was actually the Bull & Finch Pub!

What a disappointment it was to walk into what we thought was the Cheers bar that we had come to know and love on TV only to find a place that was totally unfamiliar to us. And the food wasn’t very good, either.

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Welcome to June 30, 2018 and to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). It’s designed to fill the void after WordPress bailed on its daily one-word prompt.

I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (US).

Today’s word is “continue.” Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Or you can simply include a link to your post in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. You will marvel at their creativity.